8 April 2015

All
organisations have “mass”, but not all organisations are vanguards

Mass

“Mass organisations” are held
together by common experience of a common predicament. They have a narrow focus
and they are therefore not vanguard, in the true sense of the vanguard having a
broad, concrete, comprehensive, or “helicopter” view.

“Mass” organisations are, as
a rule, defensive.

As a rule, the smaller the
definition, the greater are the number of individuals who can be included in
that definition. The category “men”, for example, can include all grown men.
Whereas in the category of people who are generalists in politics, there may be
very few. The broader the scope of concern, the less will be the number of
people who qualify for inclusion. This is one reason why “mass” organisations
are usually bigger than vanguard organisations. But this is not always the
case. There are small “mass” (common-interest) organisations, and there are
(universal-scope) “vanguards” that are relatively larger.

Trade unions are mass
organisations of workers, who recognise in each other the common experience of
selling themselves as commodity labour power in a market that is dominated by
the employers.

Trade unions began as trade
associations (e.g. carpenters, or plumbers, or fitters, or wheelwrights), but
modern trade unions are usually organised by industry (e.g. mineworkers,
teachers).

Vanguard

In politics, the word
“vanguard” means the professional force, human framework or “cadre” which can
lead the mass movement of the people on a revolutionary path. The vanguard
Party is made up of professional revolutionaries. The relationship of the
revolutionary vanguard to the mass organisations of the people is similar to
the relationship of a professional to the professional’s clients, where the
professional has the expertise, but the client is the master.

The revolutionary vanguard is
a servant, and not a master. The vanguard party of the working class serves the
working class, and does not boss it. Nor does it substitute itself for the
working class.

The working-class vanguard
party, which is a communist party, is not separate from the mass movement. It
is intimately involved with the mass movement at all times and at all levels.
The vanguard party educates, organises and mobilises. As a vanguard, it must
have expert knowledge about how mass movements in general, and especially about
how the primary mass organisations of the working class which are the trade
unions, work.

How trade unions work

To deal with this crucial
matter (i.e. how trade unions work) here, attached, and in the download linked
below, is a text from the Marxists Internet Archive’s Encyclopaedia of Marxism,
written by Brian Basgen and Andy Blunden, two comrades who clearly have vast
experience of what they are writing about.

This text is empirical and
experiential, and there is nothing wrong with that, because experiential is
exactly what trade unions and other mass organisations are. Trade unions arise
out of the existing consciousness of workers as it is found under capitalism.
In many ways, workers emulate capitalist forms of organisation. Their initial
purpose is to get a relatively better money deal in exchange for their
labour-power in the capitalist labour-market. Their initial purpose does not
include challenging the order of society, let alone expropriating the
expropriators.

Trade unions are in the first
place reformist, and not revolutionary. Nor can trade unions become
revolutionary without the assistance of professional revolutionaries, organised
separately as a communist party. Lenin dealt with this relationship in “What is
to be Done?”, but in this item today we will stay with the practicalities.
Suffice it to say, for now, that trade unionists who think that they can
dispense with the assistance of a communist party - the ones known as
“economists”, “workerists” or “syndicalists” - are on a road to ruin.

Basgen and Blunden in their
section within this text called “How to build Union” put it this way: “Unions
must be built on an immediate, common need of workers.” This section, from the
bottom of page 6 to page 8 of the document, is an explicit set of suggestions
on how to organise from scratch.